Speakers 2016

8th - 9th March 2016

Kenneth Swope

Senior Manager, Engineering, Boeing, USA

Kenny leads Boeing Commercial Airplanes' (BCA) Process & Tool System Integration Business Management organization. In this capacity, Kenny is responsible for all business planning, change management, project and portfolio management, communications and governance for integration of BCA Process & Tools including Integrated Blockpoint Release and User Validation & Test. As a combined organization of governance and administration, Business Management provides a single source for determining the health of the BCA Process & Tool System, the configuration of that system and the integrated change targeted for the system.

As a multi-billion dollar global presence in commercial aviation, defense and space, Boeing designs, deploys and maintains some of the most complex equipment ever built. With each new product offering, a new set of business challenges must be overcome and opportunities captured. To enable this, Boeing has historically implemented large suites of diverse applications and capabilities while retaining the integration role between applications.

The result has been tightly coupled systems with complex integrations and massive customization to meet business requirements with decades long lifecycles. As Boeing looks to the future, the tolerance for accepting the huge cost of massive transformations of technologies and data formats in any form, has evaporated. Further, the business demand for best capabilities, new business models and insertion of new technologies has multiplied. Contrast this position with the increasing pressure of ERP and PLM solution providers, among others, to implement ever larger suites of COTS platforms.

Kenny Swope joins us to mediate a discussion on strategies that enable companies like Boeing to accomplish a large scale transformation that would allow the company to remain current with technology while avoiding big system selections that start off with tremendous value yet can become impediments to business agility.